I don't see how anyone could possibly be a new tank. It sounds terrible. It looks terrible. You try to do a small pull to make sure you can handle everything and you get yelled at. You try a bigger pull and if anything slips away you get yelled at. Meanwhile some jackass DPS is running all over the place pulling more shit and you get blamed if you don't attract it like a gas stream from a dying star inside the event horizon. To be clear, I mean that there is a dying star and the gas is heading toward the black hole, I'm not suggesting that the star itself has passed the event horizon. That would be very hard to picture.

Meanwhile your gear needs work, because if you're a decent human being, you've not been stealing all the gear from tanks while you've been not tanking, so you're running around in some mix of garbage and trash with maybe a few DPS items that were, sadly enough, better than your actual tanking gear. If you pull more mobs, you're going to die. But fortunately, the idiot DPS can probably tank better than you, because they're at double the item level due to ridiculous amounts of stat inflation, and yet, for some reason are still in your random group.

I am, with all due modesty, an incredibly arrogant person within WoW, not because I think I'm an amazing player, but because when I put on a shield I take that as a cue to be a total dick if I'm in a bad mood. It's sort of like the Zimbardo prison experiment, in that it's a bunch of students role-playing being complete assholes and forgetting that they are dealing with actual human beings deserving of some basic dignity, like goblinism.

What this all means is that when I get treated like dirt, I brush it off, because it's all coming from non-tanks. You know, inferior beings. So I can roll through it and not care.

However the concept of healing nearly reduces me to tears. As hard as things sound for a new tank, at least they have the ability to, slightly, influence what gets pulled. They're up front and know what is going on, and wrong. But the healer, they're like a Seinfeld in that one episode where they tie him to a car and use it to make him exercise. If you've seen the episode you know exactly how badly that turns out. If not, let's just say there is a blood and then blood. But thankfully, no death knights.

I suppose I can see how a veteran healer can keep going. And a totally new player, I can see how they'd pick that role once. But then it all goes to hell. And while Churchill said "if you're going through hell, keep going", he never had to heal a heroic random, so what the fuck does he know? And don't you dare Godwin this with some comparison to Nazis.

It can't help that at low levels, as well as high levels, the healing specs are terrible for soloing. So then the healer is either soloing like crap or until level 30 is trying to healing with a different spec and probably has no regen so they're drinking every other pull and probably getting voted out for waiting around so much. Maybe heals should be free until level 30.

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I still remember tanking my first Heroic dungeon. The instance was Slave Pens, and I was a Druid. It went very, very badly.

Now I main tank Heroic raids. Everybody is a noob once. Well, except I suppose in WoW's case you're a noob three times-- once for each role. For this reason I have immense patience for anyone in my instance group who is bad, as long as they are legitimately trying to learn.

Klep,This sums up very well what tanking and healing are like in most MMOs. The only thing I can figure is that people who tank and heal (like I do) are gluttons for punishment. Probably their parents were very emotionally cruel to them, so now they seek out masochistic pleasure by trying to heal or tank in LFD.

Then there's the adrenaline junky, who only tanks or heals because they can't get through the day without a hit of panic to really blow their socks off. I know that my heart pumped harder when healing heroic bosses with a group of idiots than it did when I got hit right in my driver side door head on by an SUV going at about 30 mph (might not sound fast, but when you see them coming and you're stuck between two cars at a light, it sure LOOKS fast). That I shook off, got out, and checked the other driver. In the heroics, I had to go lie down afterwards to let my heart rate settle.

Anyway, very funny and entertaining post, by which I mean funny like emergency rooms are funny.

I personally found tanking to be the other way around for me. I tried levelling as a tank on a druid, tanked till about lvl50 and the copious amounts of fail in the group made me gave up. Kinda like the Seinfeld episode you mentioned.

whereas for a healer, the trick to keeping me going is this: 'LET THEM DIE' this applies to idiotic dps, or better idiotic tank. That's how most of the healer friends I know keep going. It seems contrary right? since a healer is suppose to keep everybody alive. But here's the thing, if they keep doing stupid things, how do you think the party will stay alive? So it's natural selection. Just let them die.

Enjoying the RAGE and TEARS OF QQ of the stupid dps is not only recommended, it's mandatory XD

Both aren't as hard as you make it seem if you pick them up at low levels. Yes, if you've been leveling as DPS and jump straight into a random heroic as tank, you are probably not going to do very well. But low-level groups don't need much tanking or healing, so there is plenty of time to figure stuff out. With the dungeon finder it is easier than ever to level as a pure tank or healer and before level 15 your spec doesn't really impact your soloing ability. Also note that the level 10 spec ability for 3 out of 5 healing specs is a heal that doubles as a nuke.